Punky Funk

PERFORMER: BEASTIE BOYS

ALBUM: CHECK YOUR HEAD

LABEL: CAPITOL

THE BOTTOM LINE: Six years after their debut, rap’s original brats look back to the future, with blurred results.

IT SEEMS LIKE CENTURIES SINCE THE Beastie Boys stormed the pop charts with their 1986 album, Licensed to Ill, an appealingly rude debut that fused Animal House antics with a pounding beat borrowed from the black ghetto. No longer the only white kids on the block, the Beasties have since been muscled aside by a host of hip-hoppers, including current media champ Marky Mark. Their response has been to grow up — sort of.

On Check Your Head they lay down equal parts of spunk, punk and funk to retake some of their old turf while displaying a newfound respect for their musical elders. For the listener, the result is like looking at 30 years of pop music through the bottom of an empty beer bottle. Live at P.J.’s at times evokes a schmaltzy hotel lounge act. Elsewhere, Santana-like Latin percussion and ’60s soul grooves join a pastiche of electronically altered vocals and jabbering wah-wah guitars. Songs like Finger Lickin’ Good mix live instruments with electronically sampled sounds and fluid tempos — “switching the rhythm,” as the Beasties say, “like another piece of chewing gum.”

Less inspired are the lyrics, which range from gibberish to p.c. platitudes (“Someday we shall all be one”). Only on Blue Nun, a snickering satire of middle-class oenophiles, and Pass the Mic, a put-down of rival rappers who “haven’t got a thing to say,” do the Beasties show a flash of their old brattiness. At such moments they simultaneously capture and embody the giddy social vertigo of livin’ large in the ’90s.